In this edition...

Front Page
- Gtk+ on MeeGo Handset bidders selected by GNOME Foundation
- Qt SDK 1.1 (Tech Preview) has Qt Quick/QML, Symbian, Maemo & desktop app support
Applications
- Beat Maker - call for testers for drum sequencer
- Status of PlayStation emulators
- Qt-based TwimGo 2.5 runs "smoothly" on Symbian N8 "as it does on N900"
- Open Media Player gets playback and seeking support
Development
- Ovi Store requirements vs. maemo.org Extras QA
- NTFS MeeGo feature and conspiracy theories
- Desaturate, rather than blur, to emphasise UI context
Community
- Meeting log for MeeGo Community Office catch-up
Devices
- Fixing prioritisation of Application manager slowness & Media player choppiness
- Prototype MeeGo Nokia device photos?
Announcements
- Pingus (Lemmings clone) released for N900
- Blobby Volley 2 updated from N8x0 to N900
- TxPad code editor

Front Page

Applications »

Gtk+ on MeeGo Handset bidders selected by GNOME Foundation

Following a donation of a large sum of money by Nokia, the GNOME Foundation have selected Igalia to conduct the work: We received a number of very interesting bids for the project, but Igalia's bid was the one that focused the most on integrating elements of Hildon into GTK+ upstream. This should mean easier porting of older Hildon/Maemo applications to the new MeeGo Handset platform, as well as easier porting of existing desktop GTK+ applications to the handset. Claudio Saavedra, one of the developers working on the project, said "will spend the next months trying to bring the best from the Hildon user experience to upstream GTK+, to make sure that the good old Maemo applications can be easily ported to GTK+".

Qt SDK 1.1 (Tech Preview) has Qt Quick/QML, Symbian, Maemo & desktop app support

Nokia's Qt strategy take a step forward with a preview release of Qt SDK 1.1, which merges the numerous separate SDKs into a single install bundle: The new SDK is a merge of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 and the last Qt SDK, based on Qt 4.7. [...] The new Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview enables developers targeting desktop platforms to use the same setup, features and environment as developers targeting [mobile] platforms. This eases the migration of desktop applications to mobile platforms. With installers for Windows, Linux (32- & 64-bit x86) and Mac OS X, and the integration of cutting edge Qt technologies and fully supported Maemo development this is what Maemo's been waiting for. Unfortunately, it's a few years late, but hopefully will put MeeGo (if/when Nokia release a handset running it) in a better position.

Applications »

Applications

Development »« Front Page

Beat Maker - call for testers for drum sequencer

Danilo Cesar Lemes de Paula is looking for testers for his Beat Maker drum sequencer: I promised this new release for the end of the last year, but I delayed it a bit due some changes in my professional and personal life. Anyway, basically this release is about bug fixing and performance improvement. It’s using less power now, and playing faster. The deb is currently available from his website. Hoewever, being a random deb from the internet, potential testers should - of course - treat it with care.

Status of PlayStation emulators

roman deninberg has put together a PlayStation emulator package which contains a number of variants, each of which may be more suitable for some games. The packages are currently in Extras-devel, so usual caveats around updating other packages whilst temporarily enabling the repo apply.

Qt-based TwimGo 2.5 runs "smoothly" on Symbian N8 "as it does on N900"

Tommi Luakkanen has posted a photo of the next version of his Twitter client, TwimGo, running on a Nokia N8 running Symbian^3. As we mentioned last week, the new version has been rewritten using Qt Quick. Via Twitter, he says: Qt based TwimGo 2.5 runs really smoothly on #Nokia #N8 as it does on #N900 too :)

Open Media Player gets playback and seeking support

Progress on the open source, Qt-based rewrite of Maemo 5's Media Player is progressing, with Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh continuing Sebastiaan Lauwers's work in hooking in MAFW:

21:39 < MohammadAG> crashanddie, mafw source implemented

21:39 < crashanddie> nice

21:39 < MohammadAG> at least for listing and playback

21:39 < crashanddie> Who lent his brain?

21:39 < MohammadAG> me

21:39 < crashanddie> excellent job mate

21:40 < MohammadAG> :P

1:40 < MohammadAG> thank ye

21:40 < MohammadAG> but playlist is left

21:40 < crashanddie> how did you do playback without playlist?

21:40 < MohammadAG> I didn't: mafwrenderer accepts objectIds

21:41 < MohammadAG> also the progress bar moves now

21:43 < crashanddie> nice

Development »« Front Page

Development

Community »« Applications

Ovi Store requirements vs. maemo.org Extras QA

Thomas Perl is a long-standing member of the Maemo community, however having developed a couple of games in Qt, he's also gone through the Ovi Store submission process. In a recent blog post he compares the QA requirements of Nokia's official store and the maemo.org Extras repository: If you want to publish your applications on Ovi Store for Maemo 5, you have to fulfill certain criteria for the package to be accepted. The technical ones are listed in the document 'Maemo 5 Applications: Ovi Store Entry Requirements'. Here are some problematic entries that were not clear to me in the beginning (coming from Extras QA and a Debian-based background). In addition to the technical items he lists, he wonders if there's anything to be learnt from the formal language of the Ovi Store requirememnts for Extras.

NTFS MeeGo feature and conspiracy theories

Carsten Munk has asked on the MeeGo project management mailing list for more clarification around the closing of bug #1980: There was a bit of weirdness about the way the NTFS FEA# was rejected for MeeGo Core, where it was not entirely clear why it can't go in, especially with GPLv2 licensing existing for the software. [...] now suddenly "Tuxera joins Intel Embedded Alliance to provide total file system interoperability" shows up, mentioning MeeGo as target as well as being Intel-specific, then it might arise to conspiracy theories as to why this feature was rejected, with a decent open source implementation existing (from same company, too). There has been no official reply to Carsten's email, nor updates to the bug. However, when Doug Fisher had Carsten on stage during the MeeGo Conference opening keynote, this was exactly the sort of enquiry Doug encouraged: to keep the project open and so keep the differentiating factor in MeeGo. It would be a shame to see this turn into another instance of the project's openness talk being much louder than its actions.

Desaturate, rather than blur, to emphasise UI context

Maemo 5 uses a blurring effect to indicate when background UI elements are unfocused (for instance, when you open a dialog). Thomas Perl has put together a patch based on an idea from Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh to desaturate, rather than blur, unfocused UI elements. Another patch, after an idea by MohammadAG - removes the blurring and instead amplifies the desaturation. I'll leave it to others to clean up the patch and merge it into MHD or any of the builds that are floating around Thomas has posted the code to his website, a link is available in the topic. With a number of these changes floating around which modify hildon-desktop, a developer could help them get into the Community SSU by making them default to being switched off; but enabled via setting a gconf switch.

Community »« Applications

Community

Devices »« Development

Meeting log for MeeGo Community Office catch-up

The meeting logs from the MeeGo Community Office catch-up IRC meeting have been posted online.

Devices »« Development

Devices

Announcements »« Community

Fixing prioritisation of Application manager slowness & Media player choppiness

As anyone who has installed or updated software on any version of Maemo will know, when Application Manager starts working everything else... stops. A Talk user, "colchaodemola", has proposed an edit to the system policy file to reduce the Application Manager's share of CPU resources: For those who hate when the apt-worker process start and make the whole system slow like hell , here is the solution edit /usr/share/policy/etc/rx51/syspart.conf search for "/usr/libexec/apt-worker" and comment it. Reboto your phone, now apt-worker will have lowest cpu shares [...] You can also change priority of the media player to a higher one, so you will get almost no choppy audio when playing and multi tasking. Be aware, that editing system files is dangerous, and changing settings like these may have unintended consequences, so users looking to make this change should take care, have a recent backup and be prepared to reflash if anything goes wrong.

Prototype MeeGo Nokia device photos?

Teh interwebz are a flutter with four pieces of contradictory gossip and rumourmongering. In order of increasing likelihood:

1) The "N9" will be running an x86 CPU. Not entirely unplausible if "N9" is replaced with "a future Nokia MeeGo device", but announced information from the 2009 Maemo Summit, code commits from *@nokia.com for OMAP360 and the magnitude of a change like that point to it being unlikely.

2) The "N9" has been cancelled and being redeveloped on a new hardware platform. Not particularly verifiable either way, seems rather unlikely at this point.

3) The "N9" will be running on a dual-core ARM chip. Again, if "N9" is relepaced with "a future Nokia MeeGo device".

4) These are photos which have leaked out of a MeeGo-running Nokia prototype.

Announcements »« Community

Announcements

« Devices

Pingus (Lemmings clone) released for N900

Mikko Koskenranta is porting Pingus to the N900: As the thread name says I made port of lemmings clone Pingus to N900. Although Lemmings can already be played trough emulation I thought having something native for the N900 would be cool too. It is not (at least yet) recommended for people who don't like the idea of potentially unstable applications (like any other Extras-Devel software) but it should be stable and I will move this to Extras-Testing if there doesn't seem to be any serious problems and when I get the maintaining status of the package.

Blobby Volley 2 updated from N8x0 to N900

A Talk user has updated the old Blobby Volley 2 port for the N8x0 for Maemo 5. I've converted Blobby Volley 2 from the N800 version and packaged it so it runs and works on the N900. It's a great, fast-paced, simple beach volleyball game for the N900, try it you'll have lots of fun... This is another RDFI (Random Deb From the Internet) so, once again, it should be handled with care.

TxPad code editor

Svetozar Belic has announced a programmers', syntax-highlighting code editor on Talk: This is just a basic version, so i can see if anyone is interested in this kind of application. Later i will try and add the ability to compile code from the app, to create macros, run scripts, etc. Some of the current features are: Code syntax highlighing; Code folding; Smart tabs; Smart selecting; Ability to open multiple files; Ability to send text to paste bin (whole file or just the selected text); Standard Search/Search & Replace functions. As the package is currently distributed as a binary deb attached to a forum post, care should be taken. Hopefully someone will step up to help trx package his compiler (a `Build-Depends') and the source to get this into the maemo.org repos quickly.

« Devices